Let’s dial the clock back to a decade ago when I first hear M83’s second album Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts which was a revelation to me. A wintery, atmospheric record of electronic instrumentals which sounded as if they were composed on ancient, broken down analog synths.

Initially a duo, the outfit became a solo project after this record, a project that began to reflect remaining co-founder Anthony Gonzales’ musical obsessions with M83 evolving into the lush, widescreen, 80’s inflected, quasi-mainstream, Tom Cruise film & washing detergent (!) soundtracking pop entity it is today.

I Have a great fondness for ‘Dead Cities’ which introduced me to their retro-futurist sounds but it was the subsequent album 2005’s Before The Dawn Heals Us that stayed with me. It provided the perfect accompaniment to countless late, long, lonely, dark evenings wrestling with my inner thoughts and desperately seeking inspiration from somewhere, anywhere.

Lower Your Eyelids To Die With The Sun is as epic and overblown as its florid title would suggest, a suitably awesome closer that ascends to the heavens; it’s dreamy, epic textures and layers of gigantic sound setting a stylistic template that coursed through 2008’s Saturdays = Youth and 2012’s over reaching double albumHurry Up. We’re Dreaming.